Something strange recently happened to me in Tennessee. I wasn’t actually in Tennessee when it happened. The strangeness emanated from there–actually, from one spot in Tennessee–and eventually reached me here up in New England.

It started with a column I wrote in the October issue of Discover, about the evolution of the human face. Sometimes people write letters to the magazine about my pieces. My editors dropped a note to let me know that all at once they got 40 60 letters about my column. All from the outskirts of Memphis. All pretty much identical in style and substance. Some had been written on a computer, but some were written by hand–young hands, judging from their appearance.

Here’s a sample…

“I